Hi all,

Over the past year, our team and product owners have been discussing how best to handle water from our laboratory water purification systems. These systems are classified as equipment and are loaded accordingly, but the water they produce is a material that gets used in processes.

Currently, we’re facing a challenge: since material barcodes are a required field, we either have to:

• Add water as a separate step, or

• Include an additional parameter on the step to map the equipment—which becomes confusing when water isn’t actually used.

Our proposed solution is to treat each tap (equipment with an asset tag barcode) as a material container in CISPro. The idea is to assign a custom barcode to each tap that matches its asset tag. When water is used, the user scans the tap into the material barcode parameter. An expression would then pull this into a hidden equipment mapping parameter, allowing it to log as both a material and equipment.

However, we’ve hit a roadblock: Onelab doesn’t allow mapping to the actual value of an equipment parameter 😞

Has anyone else encountered this? Are there any workarounds or tricks we might be missing?

Thanks in advance for your insights!